


24:6

by KarkaHatchlings



Category: Destiny (Video Games)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Intrigue, Original Character(s), Plot Twists, Prophetic Visions, Robot Sex, Seduction, Smut, Woman on Top
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-09
Updated: 2018-03-09
Packaged: 2019-03-29 04:37:15
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,589
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13919523
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KarkaHatchlings/pseuds/KarkaHatchlings
Summary: The quest for knowledge leads a Warlock away from his fireteam, but who is leading whom?  The adage "forewarned is forearmed" takes on a darker meaning within the Future War Cult.





	24:6

“This, too, was foretold.” That was how she had greeted him when he haltingly approached her in the lounge above the hangar. A hundred times he’d glanced up at the intimately lit window on comings and goings from the Tower, but suddenly couldn’t remember ever having walked up the staircase to it.

Before he could say anything, Lakshmi seemed to acknowledge the stray thought, “I have watched you as well.” Set into the white carapace of her face, her eyes were a startling electric blue spot within an equally blue ring. They flickered with expression despite the molded immobility of her brow and were lent a feminine tilt by the kohl-like line extending from the corner of their sockets. Coral-colored enamel was lacquered in thick swaths extending back from her temples to accentuate the sleek lines of the exo’s scalp.

The sleeve of her dress whispered when it slid back from the metal collar of her wrist. Her rubberized fingertips came to rest on his forearm. He was aware of the gesture in eerie clarity: the textured pads dragging across his skin, the sharp connection between artificial and organic flesh, the oddly possessive impression it gave. Blue light leaked from behind her metal lips as she made a throaty noise, half inquisitive and half satisfied.

\---

_“I see a red caul slip over the sun and the crimson tint it casts seeps like a stain across the sky, all the way to the horizon. It pools before it spills over the mountains, down valleys, floods forests and races back to where I stand. It slops against my boots, a red tide under a red sky. Everything is red, nothing is spared.”_

\---

His Ghost had been unsure all the way to the end. “I hope you know what you’re doing, going to them,” it groused. Its agitation was obvious in the waggle of half its shell. 

“The Future War Cult knows things, yes. But on the other hand, they know things,” its voice sank in dark implication. “You know? ...No?” He’d strode on and both it and its concerns vanished in a flicker of light.

\---

“Thus far, you have only dallied with the Arachs. You support their plans for an exodus, flight from Earth.” It was not a question, so he said nothing. The exo’s voice was a husky purr, “but sooner or later, all must realize that the other factions address only effects, and hide from the cause.”

She gestured with her other hand, her white-plated fingers splaying in measured grace, indicating he should follow. It was easy to let her guide him since he had come this far already.

“What did you seek? Escape? Unless I judge you incorrectly, it was nothing so futile. No, it is knowledge you sought, Warlock.”

He nodded in assent. The admission felt embarrassing though it was the most natural thing in the world.

“What lies beyond the horizon?” she supplied, “where shall we go? What shall we do? The Cult has answers to all of these questions.”

\---

His fireteam was less than enthusiastic. Cee was the first to speak up, “what’s wrong with the Orbit? They’ve been good to us so far.” She’d frozen in the act of pulling a rifle down from an armory rack.

Seren merely watched for the moment. Her green eyes glowed in interest but she said nothing and continued strapping on her heavily armored greaves. The hiss and snap of hydraulics and control linkages connecting was her only contribution.

“Oh please,” her Ghost was far more talkative as usual, “they sit in their darkened room mumbling about the future when the City needs protection in real time.” Its crimson and gold shell sparkled under the armory lights when it bobbed its disdain.

“Talk to the Arach about it first. We… they’ve got a good thing going, right?” That was Cee again, sounding anxious. The sharp change from her usual dazed demeanor tugged at him.

“He’s not going to say anything he hasn’t already.” The rebuttal felt necessary. “It’s plain to anyone we need to be prepared for the worst, sorry Seren, but I need more. There are things I need to know.” The Titan inclined her head to acknowledge the disagreement. They’d already debated on the merits of their respective factions to no conclusion.

Cee yanked up her hood and turned away. “Can’t tell you what to do,” she mumbled in a softly modulated voice and shut her mouth with a metallic click.

When she left, headed for the patrol briefing, Seren followed. Passing by him on her way to the door, she leaned close. Soft ripples of green luminescence played beneath her vapor-colored skin, but her voice was hard and her diction clear and precise. “Don’t.” 

He was left standing awkwardly, helmet in hand, with only his Ghost for company. “That went well.”

“Quiet, you.”

\---

“The Device, that’s why you’ve come to us, is it not?” Lakshmi was right, of course. Somehow she had been one step ahead since the first words she had spoken. The initiative was always hers and he was only reacting, he realized.

Here he was, ushered past the Inner Circle, given an injection at the nape of his neck, and brought to stand before the mysterious basis of the Cult’s power. The shadows gathered in the vaulted ceiling of the laboratory pressed down, heavy with the weight of possibility.

Lakshmi circled him, inspecting. She slipped his long coat from his shoulders and handed it off to a waiting technician. More moved in the gloom of the lab, their faces lit in amber from below by projected displays. Her voice, now in his ear, trampled the soft noises, human and electronic, of preparation. “There will be an autoconloquium. You may remember what you say, you may not. There are risks, of course.”

“Risks,” he repeated. The exo’s hands rested on his bare shoulders and he could feel every articulation of their segmented joints.

“Madness, death,” she elaborated with matter-of-fact carelessness, “but what are these to a Guardian?”

His Ghost emitted a piqued blatting noise from where it hovered over his head. “More work for me!”

It rotated, turning its single eye on Lakshmi first, then on its Guardian. The unasked question hung in the air, “either way I’ve got your back, but are you really okay with this?”

The Warlock took a step forward toward the Device and that was the answer.

\---

_“The world is a still pool of blood, but there’s no reflection. There are images in it, too fast to really see. A candle flickering before it’s snuffed. Lighting splits a fortress and the great fastness tumbles, stone by stone, into a chasm. I see banners thrown down and replaced with a rising symbol of circle and lines. Shining pebbles are strewn and a thousand hands grasp for them. There is a forest of machines, with unending trails.”_

\---

The return to consciousness was a slow, gradual surfacing into awareness rather than the adrenaline-fueled shock of bursting back into life after being slain. He was laid on colorful, rumpled cloth spread over a soft pallet with his coat balled up under his head. 

“I didn’t have to do much.” His Ghost drifted into view against the ceiling with its verdigris shell spinning lazily. Whatever else the Device had done, it at least hadn’t killed him. “Do you feel alright? Do you remember any of what happened?”

He dug into aching eye sockets with his knuckles. His eyes were dry, burning, as if he’d slept with them open. The room around him swam into smeared focus. It was small, almost a cell. The pallet he’d woken on was in one corner, and the only door opposite. The other half of the room was filled by a low, round dias wreathed in slowly circling displays.

Lakshmi was ensconced within, perching cross-legged with her hands resting lightly on her knees. The bright blue of her eyes burned through the translucent displays and jittered back and forth as she took in whatever they showed. Scrolling text, calligraphic writing, banks of numbers, stuttering muzzle flashes, jagged maps and diagrams girdled her. Sharp jabs of pain pulsed behind his eyes when he tried to make out more detail and his vision blurred again. Blood pounded in his temples. Blood, stains, pooling, red… what he had seen in the Device.

The groan when he levered himself upright was involuntary. Swinging his feet off the pallet and planting them onto the cold metal floor seemed to grant a better sense of stability. His toes nudged his boots placed neatly bedside. He was wearing only his trousers and quilted undershirt.

A glance at the dias coincided with a brief break in the holographic wall and gave him a clearer view of the exo. She’d taken off her customary orange and canary sashes and only her dark blue skirt and long-sleeved blouse remained. A grey fringe of petticoat peeked from under the hem of the skirt where she had gathered it up to sit. The black textured pads of ball and heel stood out against the brushed metal finish of the bridge of her bare feet. Her toes had only a tabi-like divide. Smartly-buttoned spats covered her lower legs to where they vanished beneath her skirt.

“You have been asleep, Guardian. While others have slain kings and gods, you fought in the dirt, day by day. Now you are waking and what things you shall do.” Her low voice was hypnotic, penetrating the fugue muddling his skull. She gave a sharp shake of her hands as if to scatter clinging drops of water and stood in a single smooth motion. The displays broke before her when she strode through them.

\---

The squeal from the eliksni Vandal was piteous when Seren’s armored boot stamped on its outstretched upper forearm. Brittle armor splintered and the bone beneath gave with an audible crunch. The cloak and fur-clad alien had dragged its bullet-tattered body over the ancient, cracked roadway with its good arm trying to reach a discarded shock pistol before Cee had noticed and called out a warning. The woman drew her long-barreled pistol and fired. Ether burst from the eliksni’s shattered skull in a curling cloud and dispersed into the mountain air. Its remaining three arms drummed the ground nervelessly before it went still.

“Guess I didn’t quite kill that one,” admitted Cee distractedly from where she was sitting on a broken piece of wall. The polarized lenses of her antique helmet didn’t betray what little expression her metal face was capable of, but she dipped her chin in apology.

The third member of the fireteam unclenched his fist and turned his open palm flat toward the ground. The quelling gesture dispelled the hazy coil of void Light he’d called up to defend himself had Seren not stepped in. “Careful.” Asking her what was wrong would be pointless. He already knew.

The three took a breather in the cover of the shattered building they’d cleared the eliksni from. Seren’s Ghost played a beam of light over her breastplate, mending bullet pockmarks. Sunset stretched long shadows over them and there were still several ruined city blocks to reclaim. A crew of eliksni was staging their raids from supply caches somewhere deeper in the Golden Age wreckage.

The Hunter sighed and their helmet radios carried the staticky rasp with near-perfect clarity. “I don’t hate Earth, or the City,” Cee explained, “and I don’t really care where Dead Orbit is going. I just know where we are is worn out and used up. That’s all I want: something fresh. It’s got to be different out there.”

\---

_“The images are still there, but I look up and away. It’s hard. The sky above ripples like a curtain. No, not a curtain, not a waving flag; it’s muscles under skin. The back of a titanic figure stretches from horizon to horizon. He’s flexing, straining in colossal rut, so majestic, slow. There’s no sound and over his shoulder I see a bright blue orb unfold as if…”_

\---

Arach Jalaal laughed and pinched the display of the solar system closed. “Our little blue marble.” He stroked his beard. “So beautiful, so unique. Nostalgia is a trap, Warlock.”

“One of many,” his eyes glowed from beneath his mop of black hair. “I value the knowledge you bring, and your prowess of course, but it must be in service of our escape. There can be no diversion from our outbound path.”

The Warlock nodded. As a Guardian, distractions were many: defense of the City, training and grudges settled in the Crucible, meditations on battles past, the frequent crises requiring the attention of humankind’s deathless defenders. One had to harness these distractions to a greater goal. For some time he had thought that larger purpose was to overturn the basket that all of humanity’s eggs were in, to send them rolling to and fro, away from where a single disaster might smash them all at once. Those disasters were aplenty: the somnolent, helpless Traveler hanging above Earth was a beacon to all the dark and hungry in the galaxy.

“Thank you for your report. We rely on sympathetic Guardians such as yourself for up-to-date intelligence on the Vanguard’s activities.” The Arach’s dismissal killed his unasked questions. 

Questions, always the questions. The ideal needed to be tempered, he thought, and no one was talking about it. You didn’t run through a forest at night, not without something to guide your way. So much of the past was a cipher, how could the future be planned for? Yes, he wanted to be there for that outbound flight, that discovery, but not merely to survive.

The Arachs did not care. Though he nodded to Jalaal, he left his company without being reassured. This disquiet was a final one, the Warlock knew. Someone else must have the answers he needed.

\---

Lakshmi stood before him and reached down. The metal palms of her hands were strangely warm when she clasped his cheeks. His gaze was lifted from the floor of the cell to meet hers.

“You saw a war coming. This is not unique; there is always war,” her soft voice caressed the words with loving certainty, “in this timeline, in almost every timeline and in every place, near and far. What you have brought for us is specificity.”

“We’ll be ready,” he croaked. His voice felt long-unused as if lifetimes had been spent in the Device. Perhaps they had: a hundred eternal lives played out to test all possible futures.

She cocked her head in precise affirmation. “We will make it happen.” 

Understanding dawned. “I brought you the preconditions. There are signs and portents that can be fulfilled.”

“Yes, Warlock.” Zealous certainty radiated from her artificial body. It was as if that was the source of the warmth in her hands. Her eyes were bright blue with that fervor, burning into his.

\---

_It’s opening. The blue orb swells up actinic and pixelated. It’s blotting out everything. I’m suspended above it and it’s like an arc ocean I could drown in. It sees me. It’s looking at me and it knows me. It needs something, needs me. I am falling into the sky below and it welcomes me, surrounds and enfolds me. I--_

\---

Now it was clear: the monumental coupling figure, the blue orb. Not the Traveler, not the Earth. “It’s your eye.”

Lakshmi released his face but didn’t break eye contact when she stood up straight. Nimble mechanical fingers unpinned the shoulder of her blouse and let it slip from the metal-capped socket joints of her shoulders. Next she unbuttoned the side seam of her skirt, and pushed it and the blouse down past her hips. A minute shimmy puddled them on the floor. Finally she stepped out of the grey petticoat leaving her clad only in the dark blue spats.

Her nudity was a melange of elegant molded curves and materials. Bunched artificial muscle fiber snaked in her arms and thighs under a dark, thin rubber-like skin. Her stomach, flanks and back sported a covering of cream-hued elastic canvas. Curving, segmented plates of brushed metal formed the curve and swell of her breasts and their cunning manufacture gave the impression of pliability and bounce when she arched her back in proud display. The metal frame of her pelvis joints were cushioned by plastic buffers of the same coral color as the struts along her jawline. At the apex of her thighs her mons venus was grey, molded of some soft, flexible material.

Surprise must have shown on his face for she laughed, breathy and melodic. “You have not seen an exo unclothed before? Am I not a woman?”

Under his inquisitive touch, the canvas of her abdomen was less coarse than he expected, made soft and almost downy by extreme age and use. Tracing fingertips trailed across the taut expanse where a navel would have been, down over the small swell of the joint at the top of her pelvis, and finally between her legs. Her lips there were supple in a way her mouth was not, oily and damp through some Golden Age artifice.

Lakshmi’s husked words were pregnant with promise. “Yes. Come. Make this future real.”

He was surprised to find his hands moving with unerring purpose when he undid his trousers; there was none of the excited, nervous shakiness that had marked the occasional coupling since he woke from his long death to become a Guardian. Her searing eyes followed his efforts and her mouth parted in anticipation when he pushed and kicked off the garment.

A sideways flick of her gaze drew his attention to his Ghost. The diminutive machine was of course still hovering nearby. “Will you be watching, Little Light?” The growl of her teasing question stiffened him a fraction more on top of the allure of her proffered body.

“Well!” his Ghost zipped in a circle, obviously indignant beyond mere words.

The Warlock smiled in spite of himself. “You can go.” It did as it was told and a pop of flustered light marked its disappearance.

When he reclined back on the pallet, she swung the round joint of her knee over his hips to straddle them. The warm metal and rubber of her hands slid under his shirt, peeling it upward and bunching it at his chest and armpits. It wouldn’t go any further because he was too busy stroking and guiding her canvas flanks to let her pull it off over his arms and head.

His embrace drew her closer, and he could feel the articulated metal of her spinal strut where it emerged from the canvas cover of her back. Lower, the shape of her buttocks was firm and molded under the same material. She rolled her hips, rubbing his erection with the shallow crease of her backside. Segmented metal compressed when her breasts flattened against his bared chest.

Kissing was impossible, her lips immobile and her mouth lacking a tongue. Instead he pressed his nose and cheek against her face in a struggle to somehow get closer, to feel her in any way he could. The blue light of her eyes fluttered out as she “closed” them. She reciprocated the gesture and dragged the flat curve of her visage against his temple and through his hair. A soft, needful keen, raggedly synthesized, escaped her.

One of her hands tousled his short, grey-peppered hair and he tensed in anticipation when her other hand reached down between them. Textured rubber met sensitive flesh and she guided him into her yielding cleft. When he pushed to complete the impalement, Lakshmi reared up, sliding fully onto his length. She hooked two fingers into her mouth and moaned low. Flickering blue light accompanied the lustful vocalization.

The warm, moist contact at their hips wasn’t enough. He reached up for her, fondling one breast upward and marveling at the springiness of the memory metal, the smooth curve and mesh of the segments, bereft of nipple or areola. Continuing upward his fingers encircled her throat, tracing struts and elongation joints under her flexible black polymer skin.

Lakshmi “opened” her eyes once more when he began to move beneath her. She leaned down and those blue orbs seemed to fill his vision. “Questions, Warlock,” she murmured.

“What lies beyond the horizon?” he grunted savagely. His thrust lifted her. She was heavy, but not awkwardly so.

“A battlefield,” it was spoken almost into his panting mouth.

“Where shall we go?”

“To war,” the ecstatic purr thrilled down his spine, into the pit of his stomach before exploding in his loins.

“What shall we do?”

Lakshmi threw her head back again and swayed sinuously, riding his hips. Her core clutched at him as he convulsed his last deep within her. Her sigh was triumphant. “Fight.”

\---

They lay together afterward, foreheads and knees together, his palms clasped between her metal breasts. He whispered of his orders from the Vanguard, patrols which would take him outside of the City for a time. She caressed his head, sensors all over her body feeling the touch of his lips during his final explorations.

“I give you this, to be sure that we meet again,” she brushed her face against his cheek once more after he dressed. Still nude and satiated she curled on the pallet until he had left.

After the Warlock had departed, she rose briskly. He would be gone from the Tower for the appropriate time. “End recording,” her throaty voice crackled with authority. “Title record 246-CHASM-8996. Archive.”


End file.
